Louis Malle
Louis Malle
RANKED:
3. The Lovers (1958)
Louis Malle's second collaboration with actress Jeanne Moreau in 1958, "The Lovers," resulted in a film that was steeped in controversy. Centered on an unhappy wife that leaves both her husband and lover for a complete stranger, the film became a box office sensation in France. This unanimous praise carried over into the critical reactions, earning itself a Grand Jury Prize at the 1958 Venice Film Festival. However, what set the film apart from other erotic films at the time was Malle's unwavering in showing sexual activity on screen. This resulted in a conviction of a U.S. theater owner for showing pornography in his establishment. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court, who ruled in his favor. The case resulted in one of the most famous pieces of verbiage in a Supreme Court case by Justice Potter Stewart, who, when pondering what constitutes pornography in cinema stated: "I know it when I see it."
2. Zazie dans le Metro (1960)
After his jazzy thriller "Elevator to the Gallows" and his erotic melodrama "The Lovers" debuted in 1958, Louis Malle went in a completely different direction with his next film, 1960's "Zazie dans le Metro." Although his previous two entries were a classification of the burgeoning Nouvelle Vague movement, "Zazie dans le Metro" pushed its foot on the gas to further characterize the movement as something completely unlimited to conventionality and untethered to visual congruency. The film is full of surreal imagery, as well as visual and verbal jokes, which Malle integrates into the new film language that was taking shape. Centering on Zazie, a ten-year-old running amuck in the streets of Paris, while her babysitting uncle attempts to wrangle her, the film doesn't appear to have any deeper, underlying thematic points to make. Rather, it simply occupies the free-spirit, childlike attitude of Zazie, in that it allows itself to be completely loose in structure, visuals, continuity, etc. The playfulness and whimsy of the film, along with its visual congruency to a live-action cartoon, takes the cinematic liberations of Nouvelle Vague and stretches them to their most absurd limits.
1. Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
The story elements of Louis Malle's directorial debut, 1958's "Elevator to the Gallows," is not treading new ground. The tragedy of its amoral characters comes straight out of a bleak Fritz Lang work, the crime thriller elements combined with "wrong man accused" and "crime gone wrong" plot points are straight from a Hitchcock film, and there is even a storyline that seems reminiscent of Robert Bresson's "A Man Escaped." However, the innovation of "Elevator to the Gallows" lies not with the plotline, but with the crafting of this plotline through editing, cinematography, and iconic soundtrack. Taking elements of a melodramatic Hollywood crime noir and reinvigorating them with proto-New Wave concepts, Malle was able to construct a film caught between traditional cinematic conventions and a new style of modernist cinema. Miles Davis' improvised modal jazz score was just the cherry on top of these conventions that even modern film historians and critics consider even more important than the film itself. "Elevator to the Gallows" was a film that allowed for the transition between classic cinema and modern cinema and it stands as an important milestone in film history.
Comments
Post a Comment